Scuba Diver Spears State-Record Bluegill in South Dakota

Two South Dakota scuba divers and their wives headed out on July 6 for a day of diving and boating on Pickerel Lake. The 1,000-acre lake located near Webster, South Dakota, is spring fed and a popular spot for boaters.

“It was the July 4^th weekend and there were plenty of other boats around, and the water wasn’t super clear,” Jason DeRoy tells Outdoor Life. “My wife, Kelli, and Scott and Amber Steffensen, were in our group. Scott and I went overboard that afternoon with scuba gear to spear some fish. There was about four feet of visibility when I got to the bottom in 15 feet of water.”

DeRoy says he was near some deep weed beds, and there were hundreds of small bluegills around him.

“They were post-spawn fish, and most were little 6-inchers,” says DeRoy, an electrical contractor from Clear Lake. “Bluegills shy away from scuba bubbles. But if you wait patiently, they get curious and come closer. I could see one bluegill was larger than the others, and when the little ones got close to me, the big one came nearer, too. When he was four feet away, I got a good shot on him through his head.”

The spear from DeRoy’s compressed air gun passed completely through the panfish. He was mid-way through his dive, so he speared a few more smaller panfish and then returned to his boat as a rain storm raged overhead.

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When he took a closer look at the big bluegill, he noticed it was tagged. He put the fish on ice overnight, and then had it weighed the next day on a grocery store’s certified scale in Clear Lake. It weighed exactly 1 pound. DeRoy then contacted South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks biologist Mark Ermer at the Webster office.

“Mark was pretty excited about the tagged bluegill,” DeRoy said. “The state had tagged it in June 2020 when it was 6.5-inches long. It had grown to 10 5/8s inches, which he thought was a pretty good growth rate.”

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The 1-pound bluegill has been certified by the state as a new record in its “unrestricted” division. This includes fish taken by other methods besides rod-and-reel (spearing, snagging, and bowfishing, for example).

“I’m going to have a real skin mount made of the bluegill,” says DeRoy.